“For Keynes, the most important element in his critique of economic orthodoxy its willingness to accept high levels of unemployment as beyond the control of governments … “What is clear is that any country taking Keynes’ advice and using up the margin in more satisfying ways than paying a lot of people to be unemployed would have to introduce tight controls on capital…

Hans-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann from the German news magazine “Der Spiegel”, have described the development of globalisation in their new book “The Global Trap: The Assault on Democracy and Prosperity”: They say:“World wide, more than 40,000 transnational corporations play their employees as well as their nations against each other. Forty per cent capital gains tax in Germany? Much too much. Ireland is…

“Columbus goes down in history as the world’s most famous explorer, perhaps history’s most famous man, because he found the completely unexpected, the Americas, and they happened to be full of gold. One moral of the story is that it is important to be smart, but that it is even more important to be lucky. But ultimately Columbus did not succeed because he…

“The largest single immediate cause of marriage breakdown is economic pressure which brings about distortions in family living patterns.”— B. A. SantamariaAustralian families are suffering from a steady decline of incomes, rising unemployment and replacement of full-time with part-time jobs. This has forced large numbers of women with dependent children into the paid workforce.Surveys over the past 15 years have shown that at…

History will record that Lee Kuan Yew got it right in Singapore with his Provident Fund (self-funded social welfare benefits), while Bismarck got it wrong in Germany with his social welfare system of intergenerational transfers.”— Lester Thurow, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in “The Future of CapitalismAustralia needs a national savings policy to boost the dangerously low level of…

With leveraging, there will always exist a possibility, however remote, of a chain reaction, a cascading sequence of defaults that will culminate in financial implosion if it proceeds unchecked. “Only a central bank, with its unlimited power to create money can with a high probability thwart such a process before it becomes destructive. Hence, central banks will of necessity be drawn into becoming…

“Although the earthly ideal of Socialism-Communism has collapsed, the problems it purported to solve remain: the brazen use of social power and the inordinate power of money, which often directs the very course of events. And if the global lesson of the twentieth century does not serve as healing inoculation, then the vast red whirlwind may repeat itself in entirety”— Aleksandr Solzhenitstyn, “New…

“Globalisation is the process of opening up the economy of the entire planet to multinational corporations, without demanding of them any commensurate social or moral responsibility.”— B. A. SantamariaIt is the enormous economic power of the world’s major corporations that is driving the globalisation process. The world’s top 200 corporations have over 28% of the world’s annual production, employing only 18.8 million people…

The Special Edition of Newsweekly has been written by Pat Byrne and Brendan Rodway. It is written against the background of a decade and a half of economic rationalist policies eroding the productive heart of Australia and bringing us close to ‘banana republic’ status.It is the product of years of research and writing by the late Mr Bob Santamaria and his staff.So serious…

“Globalisation is not delivering widespread economic growth. Slow growth, rising inequality and widening income gaps between North and South are becoming permanent features of the world economy.“The rich have gained everywhere and not just in comparison to the poorest sections of society. The ‘hollowing out’ of the middle class has become a prominent feature of many developing and developed countries. Increased job and…

“The totality of our experience has made us great believers in the dynamism of the free market, and in the unparalleled power of capitalism to promote economic growth … But we also believe that both history and current experience demonstrate that left to its own devices, laissez-faire capitalism is extremely vulnerable to instability and perfectly capable of producing recessions or worse. There is,…

When a number of Asian economies went into currency free fall last year, financial observers spoke of a weakness in their fundamentals which the market was set to correct. It is true that Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia and The Philippines are not run on textbook lines but it is also true that the treatment that was meted out bordered on the irrational.…